CES 2018: Tech's biggest show disrupted by blackout

Lora Ball |Sunday, January 14, 2018

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On the second day of CES, at about 11:15 am, the lights flickered and went out in the massive Central Hall of the Las Vegas Convention Center where the sprawling booths of Samsung, LG, Sony, Intel and hundreds more exhibits went dark. Initially, some folks seemed on edge-especially given past events in Las Vegas-but so far it just seems that the trade show finally succeeded in overloading the Las Vegas power grid.

"For two and a half hours it was a reboot", Lauren said. Security personnel evacuated attendees from the affected areas at the time.

Daily Dot technology reporter Phillip Tracy was on site at the Las Vegas Convention Center when it happened.

The irony was not lost on numerous exhibitors, as companies went on Twitter to join the hosts of users cracking jokes about the CES blackout.

The Consumer Technology Association issued a statement saying that Nevada Energy has addressed the cause of the problem, which resulted in an outage impacting the sprawling Central and South halls.

But the Samsung booth still had limited electricity thanks to its own private back-up power, according to CNET, an online IT news service.